Good, and, we should mention, it was cheap. Which is the most important spec.

Nice photos. Write that one up for the skeptics over at AK.

The switching power supply is behaving itself? Excellent.

EDIT: Oh, all right. My turn. One of the prettier of the few old (~1980) MOSFET integrated amps, this is the comparatively uncommon Hitachi HA-7700. First-gen MOSFET amp, decent but simple Hitachi preamp built in. Only imported into North America via Canada, apparently. 65 real watts per channel into 8 ohms.

Not my photos, by the way. These are from auctions, spiffed up a little.

I got my silly 80's Sony amp (Sony TA-V7) and it drives TK33 box as well as all my orthos without any issues and manages to sound good and look TRON like doing it. Yay for old dusty amps.

Wow, it looks great to me. Maybe having been a teen in the '80s has something to do with it.

My only question, after having my NAD 3020PE go up in flames, and an '80s compact Sony amp stop working and reveal gooey mess from old caps everywhere once opened, is if you'd better recap it and maybe check resistor values before using it regularly. My Yamaha A100 which is of a similar vintage has got very little use while I try to muster up the energy to find its schematics, order parts and get to work on it. Or am I wrong?

Smeggy, I hope those have the new pads. We can't wait on your impressions, and mods of course. And now that the UK pound is almost at unity gain with the euro, I might think of getting a pair too soon.

Ludoo, I was using your very cool Head-Fi Megathreads tool and have a question for you. Is there a way to just display a gallery of pictures? Searching does not always work on pics so just browsing them would help if one is looking for specific pic.

It turns out there was a way, and I forgot to tell you: you just had to click "Search" with no keywords, then click on "All pictures" from the results page.

I added a link from the home page to the picture browsing pages, fixed a couple of bugs, and added a page to browse author posts. If you notice anything missing or broken let me know.

Just a comment, now you can see more details, but note that the greyish texture on the leather on the photos is black and a lot nicer in reality (the frame got a bit of grey that isn't there also).

Remember, black is just very dark grey. Photo hint for black headphones: shoot against a background just a little lighter than the headphone and never never use flash on camera. Use big light sources like northern sky or big windows. That way no deep shadows form that have to be cranked up in image software, a process that inevitably brings up items that we remember as black. Heavily compressed images sacrifice shadow detail, as do most "normal" modes in basic SLRs-- they're punchy but too contrasty. We should do a photo subforum.

Ludoo, isn't the Yamaha A100 of more recent vintage? I think you're safe with that one. Does it smolder and vibrate like an Italian volcano when you have it on for extended periods?

My comment was just that they don't look light grey like that in normal light, it's an artifact of the photoshop edit. The camera is great, the photographer was at fault, being too impatient to post a photo to arrange proper light....

Wow, it looks great to me. Maybe having been a teen in the '80s has something to do with it.

My only question, after having my NAD 3020PE go up in flames, and an '80s compact Sony amp stop working and reveal gooey mess from old caps everywhere once opened, is if you'd better recap it and maybe check resistor values before using it regularly. My Yamaha A100 which is of a similar vintage has got very little use while I try to muster up the energy to find its schematics, order parts and get to work on it. Or am I wrong?

Smeggy, I hope those have the new pads. We can't wait on your impressions, and mods of course. And now that the UK pound is almost at unity gain with the euro, I might think of getting a pair too soon.

I have a lot of old gear that is 10-25 years old and it is yet to break on me. Let's see how this amp works out for me.

EDIT: Oh, all right. My turn. One of the prettier of the old (~1980) MOSFET amps, this is the comparatively less common HA-7700. First-gen MOSFET amp, decent but simple Hitachi preamp. About 65w/channel.

Very nice looking amp. Do you have the pics of the insides?

What other amps with headphone out and ability to drive transformer boxes do you have? Pics would be nice

Do I have photos of the insides, he asks. Heh heh. Asks rhetorical question about the religious affiliation of the Pope. You just wait.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Faust2D

What other amps with headphone out and ability to drive transformer boxes do you have? Pics would be nice

Ah, looking for Wiki material, are we? I should have volunteered earlier. Tonight when I get home. Bug me if I forget.

By the way, I hope everyone has visited F2D's Wikiphonia. It sounds like a disease, but is, in actuality, a growing resource that he's put a lotta work into. Sign up and start contributing already.

This would also be a good time to once again acknowledge the flabbergastingly useful search engine ludoo has engineered for this thread and some significant others. Please make use of it. It's already saved me from looking entirely out of touch several times.

Glad you all find the search engine useful. Again, if there's any new feature you'd like me to add just ask.

Going slightly OT, stimulated by the recent posts on vintage amps (love that Hitachi BTW) I connected my old Polk Monitor Series 4A to the Yamaha A500 and a crappy CD player, and was floored by how natural female voices were. Lucky for me I have most of the phones I am interested in (or which I can afford, same thing), as I see more vintage/DIY speaker amps in my future.